Real Estate Marketing Trends to Look Out

Real Estate Marketing Trends to Look Out for in 2023

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Real estate marketing changes by the minute, given the constant entry of new trends, thanks to digital platforms. Other factors that dramatically affect marketing in the real estate industry are the following:

  • Changes in interest rates
  • A growing population of remote workers who want to work and live where they choose
  • Shortage of available homes (There was a 38% shortage of home listings in November 2022 compared to November 2017-2019).

The real estate industry is fierce, and with the uptick in buyer demand, marketers must adapt to the changes. Your retail estate marketing business must evolve with the changing times to maintain a competitive edge. It also must embrace the current trends to generate more leads and close more deals.

This post delves into the top real estate marketing strategies shaping the industry in 2023 and beyond. The details will go a long way in helping you stand up, stand out, and show up for your customers to establish yourself in the market firmly.

Digital Showings and Virtual Tours

Many home buyers prefer digital home staging because of the convenience they offer. Your real estate marketing strategy can digitally showcase beautiful listings to your customers wherever they are.

Video walkthroughs are an excellent approach to this quest and stand out on social media platforms. Through virtual home staging, you can highlight the best features of a house as you narrate how they resonate with the customers’ needs.

Double the impact of your real estate marketing strategy by recording excellent videos as soon as you list a property. That will save you the drive whenever a client requests a virtual house tour. During live video calls, show off your expertise by answering questions live. Digital showings and virtual tours can reduce your real estate marketing costs by approximately 97%.

Incorporate Social Media into Your Real Estate Marketing Strategy

Pay attention to the power of social media in your marketing strategy. Take the best pictures of the homes you want to market and post them on your Instagram or Facebook. You can also leverage social media to display your warm personality, for example, by using humor in your posts. Your audience seeks engaging, informative, and educative material besides the promotional content they encounter.

Your social media marketing strategy must also be consistent. Posting once a month and not responding to your audience’s questions or concerns is the easiest way for your audience to ignore you. Look at the leading competitors and draw inspiration from them to build a memorable online presence with interested followers.

Boost Your SEO on Single-Listing Websites

Over 50% of homebuyers search for detailed information about real estate listings. They appreciate photos, interactive maps, neighborhood information, and real estate agent contact information. There’s no better way to achieve this quest than using single-listing websites. This is a must-have platform for every realtor that wants to:

  • Build brand awareness using their company logo
  • Showcase more photos
  • Capture detailed descriptions of their listings
  • Optimize their listings for search engines
  • Bring together all their favorite social media networks on a single platform

Sadly, only 30% of real estate agents use single-listing websites. Your real estate firm should not miss out. Consider leveraging the built-in lead capture forms to capture potential buyers’ contact details and email addresses. You can take your marketing strategy a notch higher by incorporating email marketing and newsletters.

Social media integration makes your listing website easy to share on all your social media networks. You’ll capture more attention on your listings and enjoy more referrals to boost sales.

Use Drone Photography to Provide a Better View

Today’s prospective buyers want to see high-definition aerial shots as part of property listings. The shots also provide a glimpse of the neighborhood to help buyers decide. To many buyers, the surrounding is often more important than the property when buying a home.

With aerial photography using drones, your real estate firm can create stunning aerial videos and images. You don’t have to spend a fortune to pull off powerful representations of a property’s surrounding environment.

The forecast is that 2023 will experience a housing market slowdown and a demand for exceptional real estate photography. That’s why you can’t afford to ignore this trend.

Target Millennials in Your Marketing Strategy

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Millennials are now more than a quarter of the nation’s population. Their growing population contributes to a generational shift in the type of buyers in the real estate industry. Being the largest demographic cohort in America, Millennials have a strong voice. That’s why brands are vying for their attention.

You must understand this market segment if you wish to win them over. Learn all you can about their needs and expectations of the buying process, which is crucial to selling more homes. Millennials are more tech-savvy than previous generations. Pivot your marketing strategy to digital solutions, paying attention the following:

  • Millennials are two times more likely to use their mobile devices to search for properties on sale
  • A majority would be confident making an offer on a home they toured virtually
  • Most millennials would like to see 3D virtual tours and digital floor plans when window shopping for a home
  • Approximately 39% of millennials would not mind buying a home online

With that, take charge of your digital presence and marketing strategy. High-quality photos, tours, and social media presence can boost your digital marketing strategy. You also must have convenient communication channels.

Keeping Up with the Real Estate Marketing Trends

The real estate market changes rapidly, and you must keep up with the pace to carve out a niche for your business. An effective real estate marketing strategy you constantly fine-tune will establish you as a genuine contender.

Given the above trends shaping the real estate market in 2023, work with a professional real estate marketing agency. They can help you fine-tune and implement them for solid results. At Steven & Tate, we have a dedicated digital marketing team willing to take your marketing to the next level. Contact us to schedule a consultation.

 

Brand Leveraging: Partnering with a Positive Brand Brings Attention to Your Own

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Brand leveraging is quickly becoming more common as it becomes harder for messages to break through the clutter. This marketing strategy uses the power of an existing brand to support a company’s entry into a new, but related product category by communicating valuable product information to the consumer.

Utilizing recognizable pop culture can help you establish credibility. It adds emotion, and further draw in a potential customer- and more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon.

Incorporating Recognizable Visual Stimuli in Brand Leveraging

Combining your product with recognizable TV and movie characters has a great impact on a customer.

For example, In Walmart’s recent commercial the owners of notoriously famous cars use their Grocery Pickup service in preparation for Super Bowl Brand LeveragingLIII. As Gary Numan’s futuristic song “Cars” plays in the background, drivers race to Walmart in iconic vehicles, including the “Ghostbusters” car, Lightning McQueen from “Cars,” Batman’s Batmobile, the “Dumb and Dumber” dog car, KITT from “Knight Rider”, Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine, the “Back to the Future” DeLorean, and even Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage. Every generation can recognize this ad, there is something for everyone.

Walmart’s U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Barbara Messing said in a statement on the store’s website that this ad is the “biggest and first-ever cross-platform national marketing campaign for Walmart Grocery Pickup.

Five Great Examples to Improve Brand Marketing Strategy Using Amazon Alexa

Familiar Celebrity Voice Endorsements in Brand Leveraging

When a celebrity endorses a certain product, you can’t always see their face. Sometimes, the only thing you can recognize is their voice. However, this still has a powerful effect on potential customers.
If you’ve ever watched a television commercial and felt for sure that you knew the voice-over artist from somewhere, chances are, you’re right.

John Hamm’s Voice for Mercedes Benz

John Hamm, known for his role as Don Draper in Mad Men, voices Mercedes Benz commercials. His soothing and yet serious voice is hard to miss, further drawing in the potential customer. It also leaves the viewer curious and perhaps wanting more. The mystery of a faceless celebrity seems to have an effect of intrigue on viewers.

Julia Roberts for Nationwide Insurance

Without being in front of the screen, Julia Roberts can be heard discussing the benefits of being a member of Nationwide Insurance Brand Leveraging in some of their recent commercials. “When we were considering how to bring our message to life, we were looking for a familiar voice that would bring our brand attributes to life,” Jennifer Hanley, senior VP-brand marketing for Nationwide, said in a statement to Ad Age. “Julia Roberts’ voice brings an assuring, and confident tone to the campaign that resonates well with our target audience.”

Using Memorable Songs in Your Ads

Though large brands are known for their products and services, it is often the experience they create that actually builds loyal consumers and brand advocates. And what better way to strengthen a brand’s customer experience than to incorporate music within their ads.
It has the ability to create a wide range of emotions, tell a story, and can even reinforce the sale.

Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” song in Toyota Camry Commercial Brand Leveraging

Many generations recognize this classic song and it’s easy to sing along to. It may even get stuck in the viewer’s head, which Toyota is definitely aiming for. It shows different people zooming off to various destinations in the 2018 model of the Toyota Camry. The timing of this song being is also significant, and the Bohemian Rhapsody movie has been widely popular in recent months. With the anthem “don’t stop me now” repeating itself in the background, this song was chosen to add to the ad’s overall message – which is – driving the Camry makes you want to say “let’s go places”.

Meghan Trainor’s “All the Ways” song in Target’s Same Day Delivery Commercials

This upbeat, positive song gets the attention of people of all ages, and not just the young ones. People describe Meghan Trainor’s music as uplifting and wholesome. Target was quick to involve her music in to their advertisement campaign. The commercial highlights “all the ways” Target can assist you.

No matter the tune, music is a brand’s leading tool to create an experience.

Learn The StoryBranding Process

Digital Advertising Trends!

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Regardless of its niche or size, every business must position itself in the market to become profitable. And with digital advertising trends coming up every now and then, it takes considerable effort, time, and resources to design an ideal marketing strategy that will work for your unique business.

As a marketer or business owner, digital advertising is crucial to the continuous growth of your products or business. But many do not know that keeping up with the most recent digital marketing trends often means spending your resources to update processes, upskill employees and acquire new systems and inventories. This explains why marketing takes a significant portion of the budget in most companies.

If you are considering updating or revamping your digital advertising strategy this holiday season, there’s a lot you stand to gain. Besides staying ahead of the competition, you also have the potential to reach new customers while building brand awareness. Here are some digital advertising trends you can implement in your business.

Personalization is Key

Before advertising any product or reserve, you must know who you target and why. Most businesses often run their digital advertising campaigns in silos without a keen understanding of their business, customers, and marketing goals.

For instance, if you advertise some digital products, you must first highlight the goals you want to accomplish. These goals should complement your overall marketing goals and be detailed enough to show who you want to target, when, and how often.

To streamline your digital advertising campaigns, you should have a personalization plan. Personalizing your digital ads means giving your prospects what they want when they want it. This helps optimize your campaigns and increase the chances that your prospects will take the desired action.

But how can you incorporate personalization into your digital advertising? Here are a few tips to consider:

  • Create in-depth customer profiles. Before you can target any of your prospects, you should group them accordingly. You can use AI technology to implement lead scoring and effectively segment your target market for proper personalization.
  • Leverage user data. A lot is nested in the user data collected in the various prospects’ touchpoints. A simple site visit, for example, can give many clues and insights into how the prospects interacted with the website and what needs improvement. You can then use these clues to create a winning video advertising campaign.
  • Use dynamic retargeting to re-engage your audience. Modern personalization techniques allow marketers to show certain ads to certain visitors, increasing the accuracy and effectiveness of digital advertising.

Video Ads are On the Rise

Video ads don’t particularly fall into the category of digital advertising trends since it’s been on the market for quite some time. However, this isn’t to say that video advertising is no longer relevant. In fact, recent statistics from Wyzowl show that 91% of businesses will use video as a marketing tool in 2023, up from 86% in 2022.

If you are wondering why the numbers favor video ads, you must first note that videos have a higher engagement than any other piece of content. Most people love visuals, and marketers are rethinking their digital advertising strategies to reflect this trend.

It’s worth noting that video advertising isn’t simple and often involves lots of creativity and expertise if it’s to make a huge impact. Here are some video advertising tips you can deploy to take your marketing to the next level.

  • Ensure the videos are relevant. You can have the best video ads in the world, but if they are irrelevant they will not convert. Relevancy in the digital advertising niche means different things to different people. But you can simply put it – the videos should speak to your prospects’ problems in a relatable, timely, and persuasive way.
  • Use user-generated video ads. Incorporating user-generated videos into your ads may seem impractical, but it’s easier than you think. All you need to do is ensure the video is edited for length and relevancy.
  • Use first-person experience videos. As the name suggests, first-person videos do away with voiceovers and spokespeople, centering the experience on the customers, business owners, founders, etc. The goal is to showcase some sense of presence, ownership, and authenticity of the brand.

Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is one of the digital advertising trends of 2023 that’s proving quite effective in the content marketing niche. With more people using their smartphones to access the internet, it’s becoming increasingly necessary for marketers to adapt their techniques to reflect this trend.

The other reason why a mobile-first marketing strategy is crucial is that new technologies such as AR and VR are predominantly app-based, making smartphones and mobile experiences the absolute winner.

By optimizing content for mobile, marketers and business owners can increase the visibility of their products and brands, helping drive the conversation. Using video content as an example, here are a few mobile optimization techniques you can implement:

  • Use square and vertical videos. Most videos with an aspect ratio of 4:5 are ideal for smartphone users and would work best for social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. For YouTube videos, an aspect ratio of 16:9 is ideal.
  • Keep the videos short. The video ads should be short and engaging.
  • Feature the brand or product message early. Since the video is short, ensure you feature the brand early enough. This ensures prospects know what you are promoting as soon as the ad plays.

Make Digital Advertising a Breeze

Digital marketing is one of the highly dynamic fields, and as a digital marketer, you need to stay up to date with the latest digital advertising trends. The three tips we highlighted above are just a few of the many, so feel free to research and try different techniques before picking the best.

Besides being on the lookout for new digital marketing trends, it’s crucial to constantly review your digital marketing strategies to know whether they are effective. You can seek expert help when monitoring your digital marketing strategies to ensure you have the upper hand.

 

Dan Gartlan helps companies of all kinds drive their business initiatives and achieve their goals. He does this with strategic marketing programs that deliver results. As President of Stevens & Tate Marketing, he has over 20 years of experience across various industries. He continues to share and build brands nationwide.

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Soft Sell Advertising: What it is, Why it works, and How to Execute

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When it comes to advertising, businesses as a whole tend to be aggressive. They let you know exactly who they are, what they do, and why you should buy from them. Even in inbound marketing, companies will try to tie the topic of conversation in with their products or services in some way. However, this isn’t the only course of action. You can also reach your target audience and successfully engage them by advertising in a more subtle manner. Such a strategy is known as soft-sell advertising.

What Is Soft-Sell Advertising?

Soft-sell advertising is a more subtle form of advertising. The goal behind soft-sell advertising is to evoke a positive emotional response. The idea is that the customer will then subconsciously connect the response they had to the brand that invoked it. Businesses that implement soft-selling marketing will often create ads that are warm or humorous, as these tend to be the ads that invoke the most positive feelings.

The History of Soft-Selling

The idea of soft-selling first emerged in 1914, when Theodore MacManus published an ad that would become the model for the soft-sell. The ad was essentially an essay on the burden of being the best in one’s field. The ad was for Cadillac, yet Cadillac wasn’t mentioned a single time. Nor was there an illustration that ran with the ad. Yet the ad was incredibly successful.

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The Benefits Of Soft-Sell Advertising

The following are some of the reasons why you should incorporate soft-selling advertising into your marketing strategy:

  • Less pressure on customers – Because soft-sell ads don’t push products or services, customers will feel less pressure to buy. The pressure is apparent in hard-sell ads, and it’s often off-putting. Using soft-selling ads, you give your audience the ability to discover your brand and make a purchasing decision on their own time.
  • Increase brand awareness – Even though you’re not pushing your brand into their faces, audiences will be more likely to share your content. The reason? People don’t share ads, they share content. When you create a soft-sell ad, you have to focus on the quality of the content and not on the sale. If you are able to create high-quality content that invokes a positive emotion, your audience will share that content. People will share content that elicits a positive reaction to their friends, thereby increasing your brand awareness.
  • Build more trust – Another result of having to focus on content quality is that you’ll build more trust. You’re basically offering your audience something of quality without asking for something in return. This shows them that you care about more than just sales. As a result, they’ll be more likely to explore your brand further. Not to mention that building trust is essential to building long-lasting relationships.

Examples of Soft Sell Advertising

Soft sell advertising has grown in popularity, both in regards to inbound marketing and outbound marketing. The following are a few examples of effective soft-selling ads:

  • Yeti – Yeti is a company that sells coolers and outdoor accessories. They filmed an entire series of videos called Hungry Life showing a well-known chef spending time in nature, where he picks plants, goes fishing, and prepares his meals outdoors. Although Yeti’s coolers do make an appearance, they are never showcased or talked about. Yeti is obviously targeting a specific audience by showcasing a specific lifestyle. That audience will then make an emotional connection between that lifestyle and the Yeti brand.
  • Burt’s Bees – Burt’s Bees uses their founder as the spokesperson. This is perfect because he essentially represents their main buyer persona. The Nature of Burt video introduces Burt, who explains who he is. He’s likable and funny, and their target audience can relate to him. What makes the video so effective is that it builds an emotional connection between the viewer and Burt, all without ever promoting the brand or its products.

Implement a Soft-Sell Advertising Strategy Today

Because many companies focus many of their marketing efforts on generating brand awareness, they tend to be overly aggressive. However, soft-sell marketing can be incredibly effective in terms of engaging your audience and building trust. As such, you should be sure to include soft-sell marketing tactics in your inbound marketing strategy.

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Vital Factors to Consider When Implementing a Growth Driven Web Design

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A well-designed site is vital to the online success of your business. Recent studies show that at least 94% of respondents rarely trust websites with poor designs. On the other hand, a growth driven web design is intuitive and positively impacts brand perception and lead conversion.

Growth-driven design is a revolutionary approach to creating high-performance websites founded on analytics and designed with specific objectives for continuous improvement.

Here are some important considerations when implementing a growth driven website design.

1. Customer Needs and Wants

Develop a clear picture of your target audience’s needs and wants, and determine the best way to fulfill them.

This sets the essential foundation for a growth driven web design. Start by developing a clear, focused strategy that pivots on the needs and wants of your ideal customer. While your website will launch with a simple version, focusing on customer needs helps you plan future updates and the continuous process cycle.

Understanding your customer needs requires creating accurate buyer personas. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers and website users. They help your team determine the best ways to communicate with empathy and personalize customer interactions.

In addition, a persona establishes a common messaging tone among your marketing team since they have a clear picture of your website’s end user.

You can start by running internal and external interviews to gather information from employees and past clients representing your ideal audience. Email surveys and phone calls are common when gathering information to finetune your buyer persona.

2. Customer Journey

The customer journey charts the road map for your website users and customers seeking solutions to their problems. Growth driven web design makes it easy to identify different stages of the customer journey and provide appropriate tools and solutions to help customers make quick decisions.

Determining the exact stage in the customer journey is essential in determining appropriate offers, website features, and supporting content for optimum conversions. The goal is to get a comprehensive view of your customer’s actions throughout your sales funnels and ensure satisfaction.

3. Fundamental Assumptions

In growth driven web design, fundamental assumptions are like the foundation for a house. Therefore, you must determine the aspects that exert the most weight on the foundation.

Establishing a strong foundation is essential to ensure the website is versatile and long-lasting. Ideally, ensure the design is aligned with your goals and has the right content to guide your team.

You can accomplish this by combining personas, customer journeys, and analytics to develop fundamental assumptions to guide your design and marketing approach for the best results.

4. Short-term and Long-term Goals

This stage involves establishing goals based on buyer persona data and customer research. Each goal is anchored in business metrics and analytics to ensure the website has all the necessary features. However, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve with your growth driven design web. Your overall business objectives guide the process by creating a clear road map.

In addition, you can brainstorm a wish list of things that might improve your website’s impact on your business and customers. Think about additional integrations, modules, features, and functionality.

This process starts by identifying elements that create the highest impact. Typically, it involves identifying the must-have and nice-to-have elements so you can cross out anything that can be added later. This process allows you to identify the core purpose of your website.

Most importantly, it helps finetune your strategy blueprint for the perfect design based on your business needs. However, your team’s collaboration between the strategist, designer, and project manager is essential to ensure the strategy aligns with your business objectives.

5. Content Development

Effective content strategy is among the key elements of a robust online presence to achieve business goals. While the minimum viable design aims at launching a functional site, it’s critical to determine the ideal content to answer user queries and move customers through the sales funnel. Ideally, you should create memorable content that connects with users and solves their problems.

ReportsThe information should be simple, well-organized, and easy to understand. Visual hierarchy helps in content structure to ensure it’s logical and meaningful. This ensures that important information gets the most emphasis while less important information gets the least emphasis.

You can achieve content hierarchy by implementing visual techniques like contrast, color, white space, size, movement, and alignment. Content hierarchy improves information digestion and guides users to find important information quickly to fulfill their intentions.

6. Process Cycle

Once you’ve launched the website, it’s important to review its performance to determine the impact on your business goals. The process involves stakeholder feedback to gain insights into traffic sources and visitor behaviors. Real user data is invaluable at every stage as it gives you a clear picture of website activity.

Depending on the analysis results, you can determine the next action based on the items on your wish list.

Possible actions may include:

  • Improving conversions by influencing users to take specific actions
  • Boost the user experience by enhancing user interaction with the site to ensure easier navigation. Periodic updates are necessary to streamline the design and content.
  • Visitor personalization by leveraging user data to implement changes that suit evolving needs, including content offers and calls to action.
  • Integrating marketing assets like signup forms, social platforms, resources, and tools to provide more value to users and enhance engagement

7. User Experience

Regardless of your site’s design and the available information, user experience determines its success. You might have invaluable resources on your website, but if the user experience hardships navigating and finding what they want, you risk losing valuable prospects.

While outstanding website usability may go unnoticed by the users, poor usability has immediate impacts. Therefore, your website design must be intuitive, navigable, mobile-friendly, and accessible. Ideally, you should anticipate visitors’ actions and help them achieve their goals effortlessly.

While visual aesthetics are essential across multiple devices, upholding a consistent brand image is critical. The website should represent your business fully and create a strong connection with users.

The Bottom Line

Most businesses are shifting from traditional designs and moving towards growth driven web design. Besides enjoying additional flexibility, the companies experience more success in lead conversion and user experience.

Instead of redesigning and launching a new website every two years, growth driven web design creates an upgrade-ready design that evolves with your business. Moreover, decisions are based on data analytics to ensure upgrades are based on real customer needs.

Creating Creative Video Campaign

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The Super Bowl is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated sporting events. It can draw millions of viewers across digital channels and traditional TV platforms. This one-day event with a history of high-profile commercials often means a lot to marketers and business owners. And while many wait a few weeks before the Super Bowl to begin working on their video campaign idea, it’s best to prepare early enough. To create the best video campaigns for the next Super Bowl, you’ll need to review and learn from previous events. That means exploring various video marketing campaigns, including the best and worst Super Bowl commercials.

In the sections below, we’ll discuss a few Super Bowl video marketing ideas and how you can use them to improve your overall video marketing campaigns.

Create a Memorable Pre-game Teaser

You’ve probably watched those super bowl ads that went on to feature in every article for the rest of the year and attracted lots of social media attention. And perhaps you know of some big-time super bowl advertisement fails. The difference between these two sets of video commercials may not be so pronounced and could lie in the finer details.

Making a thirty-seconds pre-game teaser memorable takes a lot of expertise and some trial and error. It also requires understanding emotional advertising, creativity, and proper timing. Sometimes the best ads turn out to be a complete flop, so only after testing them can you confirm the ads will work for your specific audience.

Before consolidating your resources to create a pre-game teaser, you want to focus on delivering the right message in the shortest possible time. A rule of thumb is to be unique while driving the point home. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

  • Ensure your video is relevant to the event. Super-bowl is highly anticipated; you want to capture the thrill and excitement. Everything about your video, from the visuals to the sound, should be engaging, dynamic and compelling.
  • Use suspense. There’s a lot to fit in a 30-second pre-game teaser, and your video should convey just the relevant information without being deemed boring. You can use the various elements of suspense, such as conflict, empathy, and anticipation, to drive the point home.
  • Make the video shareable. Your pre-game teaser won’t be as impactful if it’s not optimized for sharing. Consider promoting your Super Bowl teaser across various social media channels. You can leverage influencers to share your teaser and invite your audience to share their thoughts.

Utilize Humor to Make an Impact

There’s something about humor that makes it irresistibly powerful, especially in the video marketing niche. People anticipating the super bowl want to share in the fun and excitement of their favorite team engaging in a competitive sporting event that’s deeply rooted in their culture. What you don’t want to do is bring in some dull vibes and spoil their uplifted spirit.

Besides making your brand and message more memorable, humor also connects with the audience personally, making them laugh and feel good and relaxed. It also keeps viewers wanting more, it makes your super bowl commercial more sharable across social media and other platforms.

And while everyone knows that humor is critical to a successful viral marketing campaign, most marketers are yet to leverage this low-hanging fruit. But the problem isn’t using humor for video marketing, but how well to integrate humor into a 30-second commercial.

The common mistake many people make when incorporating humor into their marketing is being insensitive to their audience. A good old joke you often circulate in your department can be offensive to certain groups of people. This often comes with a hefty price and could quickly damage your brand’s reputation. Many marketers try to copy past commercials or successful Super Bowl ads, and they end up hurting their image. As much as you want to add humor to your commercial, try not to overdo it.

Leverage Social Media

Not so long ago, Super Bowl ads were meant for the big screens. Large media houses had the monopoly of showcasing whatever ads were lined up during the commercial breaks. This, however, is no longer the case. Nowadays, millions of people watch the Super Bowl from the comfort of their smartphones.

For video marketers, this means a lot as far as video marketing ideas are concerned. Instead of designing Super Bowl ads just for the big screens, you want to design them for social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Before creating a Super Bowl ad or teaser, you must carefully plan the delivery. You must also ensure the audience can easily share the video across all social media channels. Most Super Bowl commercials that go viral are well-optimized for social media. They are short and visually stunning and appear on various social media platforms, encouraging people to share the videos and discuss what they think about the game and the video commercials.

The other video marketing ideas you can implement are: posting some sneak previews and behind the scene-videos of the ads on social media. You can also source user-generated content by developing a social media challenge relating to your ad where you invite users to edit the videos for sound and graphics, with the best editor earning some prize, e.g., branded merchandise, the next super bowl ticket, etc.

Make Video Marketing Work for You

Creating an effective video marketing campaign takes a lot of practice and expertise. Unless you can create an informative, visually appealing video that speaks to your audience, you’ll have difficulty selling your products or services. Whether you are a marketer, a business executive, or a business owner, it’s crucial to understand the basics of video marketing. Combining several video marketing ideas and seeking expert advice could mark the difference between failed branding and a golden opportunity to create a memorable ad that steals the show and gets the attention you’ve been longing for.

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A Brief Guide to Sales Lead Generation

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While your ultimate goal, when it comes to marketing online, is to increase sales both in the short term and over the long term, increasing sales won’t be possible unless you generate leads. As such, the success of your inbound marketing efforts are going to revolve around your ability to generate new sales leads. Without new leads, you can’t obtain new customers, which means the growth of your business will be severely stunted. Keeping that in mind, the following is a brief guide to using inbound marketing to improve sales lead generation.

What Is Sales Lead Generation?

sales lead generation for business

Sales Lead generation refers to the process of identifying, attracting, and nurturing potential customers or clients for a business’s products or services. The ultimate goal of lead generation is to generate sales-ready leads that can be converted into paying customers.

A lead is basically a consumer (or company if you’re a B2B business) that shows some level of interest in the products or services that you offer. Engaging with a lead tends to be more productive than engaging with someone who isn’t a lead (for example, cold calling people from a list you’ve obtained or trying to hand out pamphlets to people about your product on the street).

Because you have a better chance at closing a sale when engaging with a lead, you’ll want to generate as many leads as possible. To do this, you will need to attract potential leads to your brand, whether it’s to your website or to your social media page, and find a way to convert them. This is done by giving them a reason to be interested in not just your products and services, but also your brand in general, and by encouraging them through calls-to-action to sign up to your email, give you a call, or fill out a form (to name a few examples).

Once you’ve captured your leads, you can nurture them through the sales funnel, eventually turning those leads into customers (and hopefully, loyal customers).

Ways To Generate New Sales Leads

The following are a few inbound tactics you’ll want to implement in order to generate new leads:

1. Create blog content

Setting up a blog and regularly publishing high-quality content that’s relevant to your brand is an excellent way to generate new leads for a number of reasons. The following are just a few ways that content can help generate leads:

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Relevant calls-to-action can help capture leads who are reading your blog content.

Quality blog content builds brand authority, which increases the amount of trust the public has in you. This means that leads will be less hesitant to provide you with their personal information when filling out forms.

Quality blog content is more likely to be shared by your leads on social media, providing it with more exposure to more potential leads.

Properly optimized blog content can help bring more leads via organic traffic from search engines.

Related Article: How to Have a Successful Blog (Expert Tips)

2. Run PPC ads

PPC (pay per click) ads can be incredibly effective for attracting highly motivated leads. Many businesses use PPC ads on search engines like Google and Bing to find leads who are already in the advanced stages of their buyer’s journey and are looking for specific solutions to their needs or problems. PPC ads can help attract these leads and drive them to your website.

3. Offer free trials

Consumers who are looking for potential solutions to their problems or needs will be attracted to the opportunity of signing up for a free trial, especially if they are under no obligation to buy. It’s an excellent way to draw leads who aren’t quite sure what product or service they want to go with (in terms of brand) or even whether it will fulfill their specific need.

4. Engage on social media

Engaging on social media by taking part in community discussions or posting comments on relevant topics can help you attract leads. You can ev

en post contests that are relevant to your brand that require users to follow you in order to participate. Your followers are leads that you can continue to nurture through social media engagement and that you can drive towards your website via content and other offers.

5. Implement a referral program

An undervalued method for sales lead generation is by getting current customers to do it for you. You could implement a referral program that rewards customers for referring leads to your brand with discounts or other similar rewards.

As important as sales lead generation is, it’s not always about generating as many leads as possible. Yes, the more quality leads you to generate, the better, but not all leads are of high quality. For example, you can technically buy leads. The problem with this is that the leads you’re purchasing may not even be familiar with your brand, which means that they may not even have the problem or need that your solution is attempting to address. Focus on generating your leads organically and you’ll create a much better chance of converting them.

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What is a Brand Story? Differentiating Yourself From The Competition

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With all the choices that consumers have in this day and age, just having a good product at a fair price point just isn’t going to cut it. Consumers don’t just care about the product (or service) they’re buying, they care who they’re buying it from, which is why your company’s brand identity is so important to your success. One of the important elements of your brand identity is your brand story. A lot of businesses mistakenly think that this is covered in their “about us” page on their website; however, your brand story is not the same thing as your company history but the goal of a brand story is to create a connection between the brand and the consumer, and to establish the brand’s identity in the minds of consumers. While your company history can be an important part of your brand story, your brand story involves the consumer as much as it involves your company and is absolutely essential in helping you to differentiate your company from your competition.

What Is A Brand Story?

A brand story is the narrative of your brand. It shouldn’t just provide information to the audience about who your company is, it should also tell consumers what your motivations are and should inspire an emotional reaction. For example, while the history of your company can play a role in your brand story, it’s arguably more important why you started the company than how you started it. This helps to get across your mission as well as your core values. Additionally, this allows you to address the consumer as a character in your story. The reason you started the company was to address a certain problem or need that your consumers have, after all.

Learn more about branding: Why Brand Development Matters and How it Works

There are dozens — if not hundreds — of companies that are similar to yours, whether they are competing directly with you or not. These companies may offer similar products that address similar needs to the same target audience. Simply saying that your products or services are better than theirs won’t get you far, even if you’re able to generate content that backs your statements. This is because consumers need to be able to connect with you on an emotional level. They want to relate to the brand that they choose. To do this, you need to differentiate yourself from your competition via your brand story.

A brand story makes it easier for consumers to connect with you due to the fact that storytelling has been an effective way to communicate messages and ideas throughout history. Using storytelling techniques in order to inform consumers about your company is going to make it much easier for them to stay engaged with you. There are several ways that you can do this. For example, you can position your company as the main protagonist whose goal it is to help the consumer or you can position the consumer as the main protagonist who must overcome an obstacle (a problem or need that the consumer has) with the help of your company (a solution in the form of your products or services).

When it comes down to it, creating a brand story helps differentiate your company from your competition while also making your brand more engaging for consumers, thereby making you more relatable on a personal level and more trustworthy as a result.

Creating Your Brand Story

Now that you understand what a brand story is and it’s importance, it’s time to develop your unique brand story:

  • Determine your company’s purpose

    What is your origin story? This doesn’t just refer to the date your company was founded, but why you decided to establish your business. What was your motivation? What is your mission? For example, maybe you realized that customer service within a certain industry was poor and you wanted to provide a better customer experience. Consumers want to know that there’s more to your company’s goals than just profit.

  • Understand who your audience is

    You can’t tell a story without an audience, and you need to know who you’re talking to in order to tell your story effectively. Your story should include your audience as a character, so you must know who your audience is. What are their main challenges, needs, and goals? Knowing this (along with more detailed demographic information) gives you a better understanding of how to tell an engaging story. It’s also why developing buyer personas is particularly helpful when it comes to your brand story.

  • Make sure your brand story remains consistent

    The products and services you sell need to align with your story. For example, if your main goal as a company is to provide an affordable alternative to a luxury product, then you can’t suddenly begin selling high-priced luxury items. Everything you do, from products and services to your marketing efforts, needs to align with your brand story. This means that you also need to maintain the same tone and messaging of your brand story across all platforms. A lack of consistency is going to hurt your brand identity and, in turn, hurt your trustworthiness.

  • Keep it simple

    Simple brand stories are easy for consumers to remember and make it easier for you to maintain consistency. If your story is too convoluted or long, you’ll lose the message and maintaining consistency across platforms becomes more difficult. It will also confuse your audience and help make your competitors’ brand stories appear more clear and well-defined.

  • Be authentic

    Make sure that your brand story actually represents who your brand is. Many companies try appealing to different audiences and adjust their story inauthentically to try making an emotional connection with them. This often happens if you don’t understand who your audience actually is. For example, if you run a clothing line that mostly middle-aged adults purchase but you want to break into the youth market, you might try to spice up your brand story to connect with a younger crowd by using younger slang and referring to pop culture or issues that you think they care about. However, consumers are smart — they can tell if a brand is being inauthentic and it won’t go over well.

  • Be personal

    Appeal to the emotions of your audience. You want them to feel something about your brand story. That’s why it’s important to be authentic about your motivations and your values. You should also make your audience part of your brand story so that it’s more relatable to them.

Your brand story is an important element of your brand identity and helps to emphasize what your brand’s message is. By creating a brand story and aligning your marketing efforts with that brand story, you’ll establish a foundation for who you are and what your company’s purpose is, thereby making it easier for consumers to relate and connect with your brand on a more personal level.

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Effective Marketing Strategies: The Ultimate Guide To Building Brand Authority

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Establishing brand authority is invaluable when promoting your company, especially in the early stages. However, you need effective marketing strategies to pull this off.

The modern consumer relies on research, opinions, and reviews before purchasing a product. But when a customer trusts your brand, they become more receptive. This means they are open to repeat purchases with minimal marketing efforts –bridging the trust-loyalty gap.

Building brand authority requires resources, commitment, and planning. However, some strategies can prove more effective than others. Typically, marketers should focus on creating an image that resonates with their prospective customers. When consumers trust your brand, it’s easier to sell, cross-sell, and upsell your services or products. Here are some of the most effective marketing strategies to help you establish brand authority.

Launch a Responsive Website and Keep It Updated

website updates

Your website is a powerful and effective asset in your marketing tools arsenal, forming the foundation of your strategy. When people search for products and services, they start with online research. Therefore, a website creates the first impression of your brand.

It’s essential to set up a responsive website that ticks all the boxes to help your audience find the site. Once the search engines notice your website, potential customers can find your products and services. However, optimizing the website to ensure maximum user experience is prudent.

Simplify navigation and download for a seamless experience and ensure related products are easy to find. Similarly, the content must be authoritative and informative to ensure it covers all user queries. And since most people use mobile devices, compatibility is a critical consideration. But if you want to increase trust and recognition, include testimonials from past clients.

Video Marketing

Video is an in-dismissible marketing and sales strategy in the digital age. Video marketing uses motion pictures to promote your brand. Unlike written content, video educates the audience, boosts engagement, and helps your brand stand out from competitors.

You are missing a powerful marketing opportunity if your marketing strategies don’t include video. Studies show that 92% of businesses consider video a must-have strategy that ensures lasting results.

You can create virtual tours of your business or happy customers enjoying your products or services. Regardless of your choice, focus on quality and relevance to ensure maximum impact.

Strategic Digital Content Marketing

Content marketing is a vital and effective strategy for your business. However, creating high-quality content requires expertise, but it’s worth the effort. If you don’t have an in-house content team, you can outsource the service to third-party creators with a track record of delivering stellar results.

Besides helping search engines rank your site, quality content can convert prospects to loyal customers. Serious customers don’t need irritating popups or irrelevant information –they want to fulfill their search intent.

Most prospects on your website want relevant, high-quality, informative, and engaging content. Unless you ensure the content resonates with your target audience, visitors won’t spend much time on your website. Therefore, the content should grab visitors’ attention quickly and encourage them to interact with your site and learn more about your brand.

Ideally, the content should focus on the persona’s pain points and how your products can solve the problem. Similarly, avoid overemphasizing your brand and instead focus on the offer.

Leverage CRM Tools to Nurture Relationships

CRM software helps build and manage relationships with your customers. Businesses receive multiple leads from various sources, including phone calls, walk-ins, referrals, emails, social media, and websites. Building a great customer relationship ensures recurrent revenues from return customers.

Since every lead is a potential customer, it’s critical to group, monitor, and track the leads. Having a reliable system to nurture and manage leads throughout the funnel can improve efficiency.

Besides automating customer data and tracking the customer journey, CRM can provide insights and simplify follow-up management. Depending on your business needs, you can find appropriate CRM software to supercharge your marketing strategy.

Email Marketing

Email marketing offers a channel to communicate and engage with your customers. While inbound marketingis about building and nurturing relationships, email marketing establishes the relationships in your customer’s inbox.

But this doesn’t mean spamming your audience. You only send valuable emails to people who have granted you permission, and they can opt out of your email list.

While most email marketing tools are excellent, you need to plan and schedule your email broadcasts depending on the prospect’s position in the sales funnel.

email marketing

Since consistency is golden in email marketing and sales strategy, creating evergreen sequences is essential to engage customers at different stages in the sales cycle. You can start by offering freebies to establish and nurture relationships. Offering valuable information without asking for anything builds trust and makes your prospect receptive to future offers.

The emails should go out on a specific day of the week throughout your marketing strategy to ensure consistency. This helps demonstrate professionalism and discipline when delivering on your promise.

Establish Social Media Presence and Connect With Your Audience

Social media is more than a modern broadcast tool; at least 73% of businesses consider social media an effective marketing strategy. It’s an effective platform where you can interact with your prospects on a personal level and build lasting relationships.

Social media helps establish a bond with your followers and broadcast valuable content. Most importantly, you can interact with influencers in your industry. Collaborating with influencers can boost your content reach and brand visibility since you leverage a wider network.

Influencer social sharing can attract inbound links from other websites, which increases your domain authority. High-ranking domains get a higher feedback loop since you get more organic traffic.

Most social media platforms provide users with data about their followers. Similarly, social media analytics tools can offer deep insight into the best content for your audience based on their preferences and habits.

Bottom Line

Effective marketing strategies identify your target audience and prospective customers. Once you understand the buyer persona, you can create messages that resonate with their needs and demonstrate why your brand is better than the competition.

However, you’ll need patience and consistency before getting meaningful results. Regardless of your industry, you can implement proven strategies to boost brand recognition and authority and improve your bottom line.

social media personas

Establishing Your Brand Personality Through Social Media Personas

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When setting up accounts and profiles on various social media platforms to promote your brand, remember that your competitors are also on social media. Simply posting content on multiple platforms isn’t enough to get your brand at the forefront, especially without a clearly defined social media persona.

Customers are nowadays looking for content that resonates with their needs. Research shows that 90% of consumers buy products from businesses that advocate for a cause they can identify with.

People love associating with brands that provide a personal, human touch. They would prefer to associate with a business that delivers on its brand’s qualities and values. If your business demonstrates reliability, commitment, loyalty, honesty, and longevity, it can better succeed in the competitive business landscape.

However, if your posts still miss the mark and don’t help your brand effectively reach its target audience, it may be because you haven’t clearly defined your social media persona. The persona sets you apart from the competition and gives your brand a voice.

It guides your social media marketing strategy, engagement with your target audience, and the content you post. This post will explain how to create a buyer persona to boost your social marketing strategy.

What Is Social Media Persona?

Social media personas are fictional profiles you can develop to represent your brand and target your customers. They combine qualities and characteristics that give your brand a distinct personality, including character, tone, voice, and approach. These factors are critical because they influence how customers interact with your brand.

Remember that your customers don’t read statistics about your brand’s performance and probably don’t care how many awards you’ve won. They care more about who you are and what your brand stands for, not your logo.

How to Create Your Social Media Personas?

Creating social media personas can help establish a consistent and familiar presence on your social media platforms. These personas must be authentic and align with the values of your organization. The process doesn’t have to be complicated, and you can find and build the perfect persona for your brand in a few steps.

The best practices to consider while creating these personas are:

 Identify Your Target Audience

The first step to creating a successful social media persona is to make the “ideal customer.” Who is it that your brand targets, and what are their demographics? It would help if you established the following factors:

  • Their gender
  • Age
  • Employment status
  • Income levels
  • Location
  • Home types
  • Relationship status

You may also want to research more information like their hobbies, goals and motivation, purchasing triggers, pain points and fears, and personality traits. For a more comprehensive persona, it would also help to find out the social media channels they actively use, the influencers they like to follow, and the hashtags they respond to regularly.

You can research this information through the following:

  • Your existing customer data available on your CRM, email lists, point of sale systems, and customer support systems
  • Your social media analytics, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and your website analytics
  • Collecting customer feedback through social media polls, emails, or surveys.

The goal is to create a brand persona that appeals to every segment of your target audience while aligning with your business niche.

Stay True to the Values Which Your Brand Wants to Convey

Once you have all the information you need to develop your brand’s perfect social media persona, determine the values you want to convey to your customers. Your content creation strategy should revolve around the following:

  • The unique selling proposition that sets you apart from other brands
  • How you want to portray your brand
  • What you want to offer your audience on social media
  • The kind of tone that typically resonates with your audience

Once you have answers to these questions, brainstorm a list of adjectives to describe your brand’s voice. Think of terms like professional, candid, passionate, authentic, relatable, bold, honest, and trustworthy. These will guide your brand’s personality when approaching the above factors. Staying true to these values is the easiest way to maintain consistency across all your social media platforms.

Choose Visual Elements Which Align with Your Brand Identity

In maintaining consistency across your brand, you also must include visual elements that resonate with your brand. Studies prove visuals are more effective in passing your brand message than words. Photos, videos, illustrations, and infographics can strengthen your brand and boost engagement with your audience.

Choose visual elements that embody your brand’s personality and create a strong brand image. Some tips for creating compelling visual elements that your audience easily recognizes are:

  • Creating a visual guide to ensure consistency, including colors, sizes, fonts, and file formats
  • Using unique visuals such as custom illustrations as opposed to stock images
  • Repurposing content such as customer feedback, product images, and blog posts

Stay Consistent Across All Platforms

Inconsistency is one thing that can kill your branding efforts on social media. Strive to stick to the persona you created across all your social media platforms. If your business description, tone, values, messaging, or brand image differs across the platforms, your customers will likely perceive your business as multiple entities. The result is lower engagement and fewer sales.

An effortless way to maintain consistency in your message is to develop a comprehensive voice and tone guide for your brand. It should appear on your blog, company website, social media platforms, email newsletters, and other touchpoints relevant to your business.

Your Social Media Personas Can Boost Your Marketing Impact

Creating a social media persona for your brand can take time. It also requires that you have the right tools and leverage teamwork for the best results. Once you do the groundwork, you will have a valuable tool to create compelling content.

That way, you can meet your customers right where they are and communicate effectively. Besides, you will improve your social media strategy for more personalization to increase overall conversion rates. A digital marketing agency like Steven & Tate can help you get your social media marketing strategy right. Talk to us for a consultation.